“And if older African American boys are seen as “second quality” children within this system, queer households are seen as “second quality” parents even as they are sometimes deemed preferable to single black female-headed households that are similarly pathologized. This trauma of having a “free market” deem the value of both adoptive parents and their children, of not being afforded the social status of “real” biological kinship but indeed the only available approximation bought through the crassness of economic exchange, functions in discourses of adoption even in the absence of racial difference,” (page 15).

And I find myself agreeing with her adamantly. I don’t know a lot about the adoption process, but I have always heard that white babies are the most expensive and “desirable” on the “market.” If you think about it, or at least when I think about it, most depictions in popular culture of teen girls who give up their babies are white girls, and the child is readily adopted. I can’t think of a single black teenage mother who is encouraged to give up her child for adoption, let alone the baby getting adopted easily.

One obvious example of this is in the film Juno. I’m sure many of you have seen it and have an idea what happens in it, but if not, here’s a 2.5 minute trailer that gives you a basic idea of the plot.

The adoptive family is your “all-American” middle class white family, a woman and a man. SPOILER ALERT! In the end, the woman ends up adopting Juno’s baby alone, as the man is not ready for a child. But this film, despite highlighting the anxieties of many of its characters surrounding the birth of a child and their lives outside of that, shows that it’s easy for a white baby to get adopted and similarly, it’s easy for a white heterosexual family to adopt.

Another part of Rodriquez’ chapter that struck me was the part about Charis Thompson’s adoption experience:

“Haunted by histories of slavery in which human beings were exchanged for money, property and cattle, Williams finds herself faced with the reality of having to pay for the young black male body she will bring into her home. Furthermore she is confronted with a fee structure for her newly adopted son that marks him as “special” because he fits into the category of children that are “less requested,” in other words children that are older, black and/or handicapped,” (page 14).

This just goes along with my commentary about the “desirability” of white bodies vs. bodies of color in the adoption system. I don’t know any statistics about the ethnicity of adopting families, but I think it would be interesting to see how many white heterosexual couples apply for adoption vs. couples of color and/or gay, lesbian and/or trans couples, how many get accepted from each category and what ethnicity they request for a child.

As for how domesticity is queered, Rodriquez looks at Kath Weston’s book “Families We Choose,” in which she writes:

“Adoption, when it is recognized however, in fact undoes the easy binary of “biological family/chosen family” that Weston sets up in her book (40), potentially queering even those families marked as heterosexual. Of course, neither adoption nor any other form (or rejection) of kinship is inherently subversive, instead how families are created, imagined and perceived reveals the process through which social meaning is assigned to various forms of intimacies,” (page 11).

So in a way adoption is a way that domesticity is queered in society, because we don’t look at an adoptive family as a “real” family because they people in it are not connected by blood.

For me, the most provocative portion of the class was actually this chaper from Rodriquez, especially when she talks about NAMBLA and “Doing It For Daddy.” The latter discussion in the article as well as the one we had with Rodriquez in class made me very uncomfortable, but I think that’s a good thing because it forced me to think about something in a very different way than I normally would and provided a lot of insight into my own personal interest in sex and psychology. I found it most interesting that abuse survivors often find solace in BDSM communities/“Daddy” practices. Now it makes perfect sense to me and I feel like I have a greater understanding of some human sexuality practices now.

My favorite part of the class was watching “Delinquent,” I loved it. Our discussion about the film was also very stimulating and I appreciated the fact that what I didn’t get out of the film, others did and vice versa. As for what I would add, I would maybe try to add more media elements, just because those are what I found the most interesting.

Lastly, I really appreciated all of my classmates and what we learned from one another. That is the most productive type of class in my opinion, one in which there are a lot of people from different backgrounds and interests who come together and all teach each other something. So, thank you ladies! =)

In heteronormative relationships, the concept of having or adopting children is matter of immense importance to and scrutiny from the state and society, in various ways.  First, there is an automatic connection with having children that the only legitimate bodies are produced from relationships which are recognized by the law.  This says a lot about the pervasiveness of policy in the realm of the private. By requiring for a person to specify their partnership status, this implies that it is apparently a matter of consideration.

From http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/pervert-1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/%3Fp%3D37572&usg=__YS0P2cfNe-ZrHU3f98ucaI7AkgQ=&h=320&w=261&sz=20&hl=en&start=0&sig2=o5uUe-EoUS9r74Cps2UaIA&zoom=1&tbnid=IDvHWg-0LPnFLM:&tbnh=134&tbnw=109&ei=Qsf6TbD2Acbs0gHZ55HGAw&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dperverts%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26sa%3DX%26rls%3Den%26biw%3D1275%26bih%3D600%26tbm%3Disch%26prmd%3Divns&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=129&vpy=220&dur=428&hovh=139&hovw=113&tx=75&ty=109&page=1&ndsp=19&ved=1t:429,r:6,s:0&biw=1275&bih=600

In terms of adopting, although it is legal for individuals who are single to adopt, the invasion of public policy and norms can and likely will influence adoption forms, especially by the individual who is reading them.  Rodriguez clarifies this nicely when she says, “Here children function as the excuse for secularization policies in which some bodies are constructed as always potentially criminal, and others as always potentially in danger…” (Rodriguez 3).  The decision as to what bodies are considered dangerous is informed through a recognition of a person’s relationship status and the norms which tag certain bodies as deviant in forms of gender, sexuality, and adherence to accepted discourses of a parental body.

Found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Be_Perverts

An example of a common tactic which aligns relationship legitimacy with marriage is the inclusion of “marriage status boxes on medical forms and a plethora of other applications, which should not have any say in a person’s care or privileges.

2. I found this course to be extremely provocative in terms of its recognition of deviant forms of sexual expression.  Issues like S&M, role play, and personal versus enacted fantasy play a huge role in the public perception and discussion, and I was not accustomed to talking about these issues in terms that located them within the normal sphere of human sexuality and experience.  While at first perhaps a little awkward and strange, such discussion has led to a refreshing new view on the “other” bodies that I have for so longed wondered about and could not seem to situate in my mind in terms of mental and physical disfunction versus normal and functioning.

That being said, I extremely enjoyed the new knowledge I have gained and, as expected, feel empowered by this knowledge to re-situate public perceptions and government policies (even if only in an “eventually” mentality). That being said, I also feel as though some changes are within reach in my lifetime, and I hope to be a part of that, if even just a miniscule part.

Of course, knowing the path down which my thoughts always seem to travel, I would have been interested in more topics covering the current War on Terror and the policies, affects, and norms that have resulted in terms of immigration.  I found Toby Beauchamp’s article to be informative, intriguing, and thought provoking in this realm, and I enjoy hearing different readings of policy widely accepted as necessary and positive. Especially since this is the first step in truly instigating change, the previously stated goal for myself in learning about these issues.  I also think this is an interesting topic due to its “here and now” persona mixed with highly visible markers that decide the fate of bodies and groups.

I feel like Priyanka’s connection between immigration and mental health is a very intriguing topic.  This is a form of epidemic narrative and, as someone with extreme personal experience of the mental health system and the perceptions that come along with a diagnosis, I feel as though the narrative quite strong when considering native citizens and therefore the invocation of a foreign mental illness can be (and I’m sure has been) a site of intense policy making and public action/reaction.

Also, I really enjoyed Bekki’s somewhat weekly posts incorporating visual media in terms of Disney and children’s cinema.  This was truly indicative of the enduring impact of norms, as they are ingrained from birth.  Also, I have taken a class concerned with the “Disneyfication” of America, and I think that Bekki did a great job of speaking to this phenomenon through the analysis of these movies.

Works Cited

  Rodríguez, Juana María. “Queer Domesticity.” Sexual Subjects, Queer Gestures

With many queer openly objecting to a national political agenda that attempts to make queers palatable to these same middle-American enclaves through a reappropriation of family values discourse and political platforms focused on same-sex marriage and homonormative formulations of family life. Others object more privately and in hushed tones to a perceived sense of entitlement form newly minted LGBT parents emerging from a neo-liberal discourse that attempts to position parents has more valued and worthwhile members of civil society because they have taken on the task of the primary care of another. (5-6)

To elucidate this point I want to examine two films, separated by a 15 year span, that both position a gay/lesbian couple in conflict with the raising of their children. The Birdcage (1996, dir. Mike Nichols) stars Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, and Gene Hackman. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane are featured as a gay couple who have raised a son, Val (Dan Futterman), who was conceived during a brief heterosexual relationship that Robin Williams had with a woman. However, the woman had no part in Val’s parenting. The plot is complicated by Val’s engagement to the daughter of a conservative Republican senator, who is seeking re-election as the co-founder of the “Coalition for Moral Order”, and centers on the intended meeting of both families.

Adding to this already layered plot, is that Robin Williams is the owner of a South Beach drag club called The Birdcage and his partner is the show’s star drag queen. Taking the form of a comedy, the film explores concerns over the quality of parentage that a gay couple can provide as well as an “inside” look into what gay domestic life entails. The film’s themes are reflective of the time in which it was produced as norms of queer parenting were only beginning to surface.

More recently, in 2010, the film The Kids Are All Right (dir. Lisa Cholodenko) takes a different approach to queer domesticity by presenting a lesbian couple who both had artificial insemination to conceive their two children at the same time, thus undergoing pregnancy together. Starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo, the plot focuses on the children’s desire to find out who their sperm donor father is—thereby indicating a void felt within their current familial construction. Fitting within this model, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, lesbian mothers, are struggling in their relationship when the sperm donor father, Mark Ruffalo, “joins” their family. Despite the initial struggles that the father-figure presence has on the family, including the heterosexual affair between Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, the end culminates in an acknowledgement that the father-figure is a rightful and fitting addition to the family structure. Advertised as a comedy, the film in actuality is more befitting of a drama and certainly strays far from the comedic elements that The Birdcage offers which indicates the intended marketing of the film as a funny, light-hearted narrative but instead delivers a serious commentary on queer domesticity.

It is important to note the star casting in both films as it relates to a more “valid” perpetuation of homonormativity. Rodriquez recognizes the complexity involved in representations of the queer couple in “the current attempt to normalize queers in the public eye, has had troubling consequences, promoting homonormativity and assimilation rather than a radical rethinking of sexuality and queerness and its relationship to domestic life” (6). Both films uphold notions of homonormativity, conforming to Rodriquez’s assertion of queer representation in the public eye. Both couples featured are also white and wealthy which serves to further reinforce ideals of acceptable queer domesticity.

The Birdcage addresses (mis)representations of gender that are rife in depictions of queer couples—this is evident in the trailer with the clip of Robin Williams teaching Nathan Lane how to be “manly” while Nathan Lane conforms to ideals of femininity and the image of a “housewife.” The Kids Are All Right moves away from such stereotyped conventions—indicating a historical shift in the filmic production of queer couples—and instead addresses the instability in both relationships and familial structures.

Another, interesting, facet of the film The Birdcage is the subtle emergence of religion as a discriminating factor. When Val’s fiancé introduces Val’s father’s she changes the family’s last name from Goldman to Coleman to hide their Jewish background. Religion plays a large role in not only discourses of queer domesticity, but in queer studies as a whole. This course has explored intersections within queer studies as they merge with other disciplines involving sexuality, mobility, and citizenship. The course as a whole was highly engaging and informative, especially in the way it merged multiple disciplines. It would be interesting to have explored a religion more directly within this course of study.

I was most interested in how performance was used in representing the production, regulation, and disciplining of queer bodies. I found the work of Mónica Enríques-Enríquez, activist group Gay Shame, and Keith Hennessy to be particularly engaging given my field of study in theatre and performance. Each presents a different mode of representation and exploration through physical performative art. Combined with critical readings by Eithne Luibhéid, Siobhan Somerville, Jasbir Puar, David Eng, Toby Beauchamp, and Pricilla Wald (among many others) the course draw out the continued complexity surrounding queer bodies and migration along with policy and citizenship.

I think the most interesting week was the one where we discussed the dichotomy between the Gay Shame movement and the BDSM advocates. Perhaps this is influenced by the fact that I facilitated discussion that week, But Mattilda ‘s article fascinated me as I couldn’t decide how I felt about her stances. I suppose it made me think of my socialist book club that often takes things to the extreme (which is one of the reasons I’ve stopped going). It is important in a political landscape to tone down rhetoric so that people will listen instead of passing by like residents of New York City who rush past the pamphlet pushers. At the same time, it’s important not to back down from a fight you feel strongly about. So it turns out that I still don’t know what to think about Gay Shame, which I guess is just an extension of my political ideals.

I was impressed with everyone’s blog connections. We all started with the same materials, the same prompt, and almost always went in completely different, intelligent directions. The final projects were especially interesting to me, seeing what everyone got out of the class. It was interesting to see where personal interests mixed with a project for a class about Queer Theory, a theory which often frightened my friends when I first told them about the class. They were OK, sometimes a little iffy about a course called Feminist Theory, but most of them (except a friend who had gone through a women’s studies program at IUP) thought that Queer Theory was perhaps pushing the envelope on class subjects. Fortunately, my friends are an open-minded bunch and, once I explained to them what the class was about, some of the connections I made, influencing some to read my blog, they understood and ACCEPTED the class, which was very uplifting. It was also fun to talk about what I was learning to my boyfriend’s very socially liberal father. He was usually encouraging about the subject material, though the name of the class frightened him a bit.

I feel like with everything I had learned and absorbed through the women and gender studies program at PITT, I will make a significant difference in the world. And I feel the same for everyone in our little session (perhaps too short to really call a class?). The intense submersion in the articles, having to digest and blog quite soon after reading, this session was the most intensely I’ve ever had to consider serious issues concerning real, live people. Majoring in history, I often ponder what might have been done differently so that terrible things might have been avoided, but women’s studies looks at what we can change now for a brighter tomorrow. Every little thing matters in the course of history, be it an acceptable immigration policy or having Gay Shame instead of gay pride.

This feels cliche, but I’m going to do it anyways. We can change the world by looking at things differently.

Photo Credit: http://tumblinfeminist.tumblr.com/post/5532695085/fool-proof-sexual-assault-prevention-tips

Work Cited

Rodriguez, Juana Maria.  ”Queer Kinship and the Quandaries of Domestic Affection (DRAFT).”  Sexual Subjects, Queer Gestures.  1-39.  Print.

P.S. I am very excited that Kristi made a blog about midwives since I am very interested in using a midwife when I get around to having kids (right now it seems so far into my future that it’s barely worth thinking about, but being 23, I know how fast time goes when you aren’t watching. I’m pretty sure I was 17 3 days ago). Everyone else’s final project was also awesome and interesting and fascinating and fun, but I think this blog will be most useful in my life.

P.P.S. Women’s Studies courses (and history, but only because that’s my major and I might need my notes again) are the only classes I keep my notes from. From brilliant connections to funny things said in class to flawless drawings of the continental United States, these notes will be useful (and occasionally hilarious) forever.

Here is the quote from the article that formed the basis of my slightly subconscious analysis of the Kauras and the Millers:

“However, understanding that parenting can itself function as a source of everyday trauma demands that we name the unspeakable – not of the joy of children but of the loss of social, affective, and sexual anatomy that is demanded of us as parents” (24-5).

How is parenting difficult, and what does it mean if parents recognize that?  My parents would never be caught dead saying that parenting was hard.  They did not take breaks from it, and they did not seem to ever want to have social lives separate from mine and my sister’s.  They took my cousins with them on their honeymoon, because they thought it would be nice for the kids to travel.  They invited my friends’ and their parents over for awkward dinner parties all the way through my high school career, so that they could get to know my friends’ families.  I never once had a babysitter because if my parents had somewhere to go, we went with them.

As a child, I definitely did not enjoy this – even now, though I appreciate it, I recognize that it is a little odd.  Why didn’t they want to have lives of their own?  I think it can be explained by cultural differences in the way that parenting is constructed.  Immigrant culture is especially saturated with “discourses that define children as the future” (Rodriguez 25).  I remember one of the interviewees in Monica Enriquez-Enriquez’s film, “Un/Binding Desires” speaking of “immigrant guilt” that children of immigrants feel.  This is because of the importance that immigrant culture attaches to children.  The rhetoric of “doing it all for the kids” can fuel transnational migrations in search of opportunities for the next generation.  From my vantage point, it seems that my parents are truly happy with everything they have done for my sister and me.  Perhaps I am getting a slanted view of this because I am their child, but I honestly cannot imagine them ever describing parenting as “traumatic.”

On the other hand, the Miller family has quite a relaxed view of parenting.  In fact, they are moving across the country because they are bored with Pittsburgh.  In addition, though both parents work from home and two of their kids attend school, they are used to hiring a babysitter to help with the kids.  I am not trying to criticize this practice, but just mark it as very different from my own childhood experiences.  For these parents, parenting is quite obviously just one part of their life, and that does not make them worse parents. However, I do think that this attitude must have an effect on both the parents and their children.  They must have a different concept of what it means to be a parent.  It is interesting to me that both of our families, with these different styles of parenting, could be considered “normative.”

I would also like to note how much I have enjoyed this class, and how much I have learned from it.  It probably won’t really sink in for a little while, but I have already noticed that the way I read any essay or watch any movie has been seriously altered over the course of these six weeks.  If I had to pinpoint the one area in which I gained the most understanding, it would be state surveillance and control over bodies.  I am certainly becoming more aware of the strained, uneven relationship between government and citizens in other areas of my life – especially in my internship with a state-funded nonprofit organization and my research of a former government representative.  I do wish that the class were longer and we were able to talk about more texts.  The ones I found most challenging were the two by English professors – Schweik and Wald, and I was a bit confused about the place of the two trans activist pieces in the fifth week of the syllabus.  But all in all, I really think I have gained a huge amount of knowledge from this class, and made some great friends, and I plan to continue engaging with this subject material for a long time to come.  I hope to stay in touch with all of you!

Works Cited:

Rodriguez, Juana Maria.  ”Queer Kinship and the Quandaries of Domestic Affection (DRAFT).”  Sexual Subjects, Queer Gestures.  1-39.  Print.

Enriquez-Enriquez, Monica Un/Binding Desires. Film.
*I’m sorry, I really don’t know how to cite this!

I believe I must write about Law and Order: SVU here in my last blog post since it seems to have a representation of everything.

One thing Law and Order does often in its shows are racialized adoption.  Most adoption cases featured in Law and Order have non-white children as those who are adopted.  I can think of few episodes where the child is not white.  They also have many episodes where gay couples are featured and are so very often seen as deviant.  In most of the episodes, when a child is harmed in anyway sexually, Detectives Stabler and Benson search the databases for pedophiles and when the pedophiles don’t pan out they search for homosexuals.  If you are a convicted sexual predator and a homosexual, then you are usually the first sought out by the detectives.

I am not sure if I understand what Juana is trying to say but I am going to try to sort of my views. I feel that SVU shows this struggle of being a homosexual parent and deviating from this heterosexual norm.  The heterosexual normative of parenting sets up this hierarchal framework where the parent owns the child.  However, in a homosexual household the parent cannot be seen as owning the child because of this homosexual=pedophile stereotype.  A pedophile controls their victims and homosexual parenting makes this hierarchal framework even messier because is the homosexual being a parent or being a pedophile? SVU shows that the homosexual parent is the most scrutinized, next the homosexual pedophile in the neighborhood, and then when those avenues do not lead to any arrests they search for the straight pedophiles.

Overall I felt the entire class was very helpful to my political science major and what I hope to do with the rest of my life (working in the legal and political fields).  The ideas that we discussed regarding the immigrants and queer bodies in the United States will help me in ways that other classes cannot.  Before this course, I received such a one-sided political view of many of these topics.  This class allowed me to open my views to a more rounded understanding of each group: immigrants and queers.  I think everything about the class was astounding for me because of my politics background and I enjoyed coming to class, listening to others thoughts, and being able to put in my own knowledge of politics and law into our course discussions.  I plan on broadening my final paper about Birth Tourism and the entire immigration topic with my Capstone Seminar in American Politics and will definitely be taking the ideas I learned in this class and using them to help me write my final paper needed to graduate.  I loved Somerville and Luibheid – some of the first authors we read – and also loved being able to listen to what two of the authors thoughts and feelings were while writing their pieces (Toby Beauchamp and Juana Rodriguez).  I think as a political science major, this course is the best class to be taken as an elective (even though I took it for my certificate). I was constantly finding topics discussed in class that had some sort of political background or something that I could tie to politics.
I site my memory and love of Law and Order for my visual text: Law and Order SVU reruns play on USA or Channel 25 here in Oakland.

“The queer imperative becomes how to talk about parenting, and the circuits of affective and material labor, exchanges and power that underlie its social function, without normalizing or naturalizing heterosexual reproduction.  In a world with proliferating bodies and depleting resources, heterosexual biological reproduction–like all other forms of parenting–is deeply implicated in larger circuits of transnational labor, and political circuits of economic and material exchange” (17-8).

I feel like I may not be understanding this quote thoroughly, but I believe it is getting at the fact that variations of parenting are what produce the norms and discourses through which we may understand, identify, and discuss modes of parenting.

Secondly, she states:

“It is through this repeated performative act of affective ownership, ownership that defines who we care about and who we don’t, that we come to be validated as parents as well as citizens of the nation.  As Judith Butler has stated ‘Kinship is itself a kind of doing, a practice that enacts the assemblage of signification as it takes place” (19).

Here, I believe she is referring to the ways a parent confers ownership onto his or her child through modes of performance recognized, through the absorption of social and cultural parenting norms, by that parent as an intelligible way to identify as parent in relation to the child.  This performance requires an exchange of power, emotions, and knowledge, where the parent is likely exerting power while the child receives emotional and intellectual support in exchange for those given up powers over him or herself.

Next, I would like to briefly focus on Rodriguez’ section of Sexual Subjects, Queer Gestures’ Chapter 2 entitled “Disciplinary Paternalism, or Doing it for Daddy.”  This portion seemed to stir up quite a bit of conversation, ideas, and opinions in class this week.  I also found it the most confusing and surprising.  She states, “[t]he idea of intimate familial power serving as a source of erotic pleasure has wide rhizomatic reach in queer communities…In these fantasy sexual scenarios, daddy can be kind, he can offer us lollipops and fondle us gently, or he can be the harsh disciplinarian that utilizes his sovereign authority over the family as the means to demand (or allow) complete submission.  Daddy as fantasy subject position is a possibility that locates the erotic at the very core of heteronormative family life.  This daddy, that we are so anxious to ‘do it for’ may or may not have any direct correlation to the embodied figures that may have occupied these roles when we were ourselves under the legal and social guardianship of others” (27-8).

With this in mind I would like to merely provide some art I found today that immediately I linked with these ideas:  Gawker artist group, Daddy.  Here’s how the group describes themselves, their art, and purpose, and the link and some of their work:

“DADDY is an interdisciplinary art collective dedicated to the study of use in contemporary practice. Through fine art platforms, DADDY produces industrial and communication design, objects and installations that investigate the relationship between object and user.  Currently, DADDY is engaged in a series of projects traversing psycho-sexual characteristics of consumer goods as well as installations responding to aesthetics of ‘neighborhoods in transition.’  DADDY IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE” (DaddybyDaddy).

http://daddybydaddy.com/index.html

http://artists.gawker.com/post/6358919612/iso-daddy

Obtained from: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmjb5fmXG21qzg2j4.jpg

Obtained from: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmjb5iQmj21qzg2j4.jpg

Obtained from: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmjbm5MxuV1qzg2j4.jpg

Lastly, I would like to express just how much this course has benefitted me.  I have strengthened my understanding of the ever-changing relationships between sexuality, mobility, and citizenship and how they produce, regulate, and discipline bodies, identities, intimacies, and interpersonal relationships.  I feel that with this insight I have a gained capability to analytically and queerly parse through these relationships in social, educational,  economic, and political sites I encounter daily, focusing on how power relations directly and indirectly utilize qualities of race, gender, class, and sexuality to produce certain desired and undesired outcomes.  I feel I have acquired a greater sense of tolerance for the products of these relationships, whether a body, identity, institution, or idea.   And, I feel I have found these skills useful not only in school, but in developing and delving deeper into my own personal interests and relationships, something I am truly grateful for.

Works Cited:

Rodriguez, Juana Maria.  ”Queer Kinship and the Quandaries of Domestic Affection (DRAFT).”  Sexual Subjects, Queer Gestures.  1-39.  Print.

“Daddy by Daddy.”  Daddy.  Web.

(image created with Wordle)

I want to talk about music. Not a big surprise, I’m sure. That’s what I’ve been writing about all along. But this time, I talked to my friends. I talked to my friends because I’m somewhat of a music snob (even though I mostly talked about Lady Gaga!) and I really wanted songs to analyze that were predominantly within the realm of widespread social consciousness, or at least could potentially be, as they are performed by well known artists. I wanted to make this piece ethnographic in a way, to take a survey of what people are listening to and then somehow incorporate that into the framework of the class. I have decided to examine songs that have to do with four of the six themes explored in this class: Mobility and Citizenship; Privates, Publics, and Other Ideas; Visual Citizenship and State Surveillance; and Forced Immobilities and the Prison –Industrial-Military Complex. As written in Michigan Citizen, “Young people live in a world that is saturated with music, they listen to it all the time. It is extremely important to think about how that music shapes the way they see the world…the way young artists can make interventions with their music,” (Blues). I think this statement is wholly accurate, music is often something not just young people, but people of all ages dive into and allow to influence them, consciously or unconsciously. And it’s something that is not necessarily taken as a serious source of cultural or political impact. But music is completely part of the everyday, just like ads that we “don’t notice,” music is everywhere. And hopefully this paper and the media that is a part of it will go to show that it is very influential in how we think and perceive larger cultural structures.

Mobility and Citizenship

First, a quote from Luibhéid:

“The concept of heteronormativity has proven particularly useful in untangling connections among power, knowledge, and queer migrant identities. Refus- ing a homo-hetero binary logic, this concept is valuable for its ability to articulate how normalizing regimes produce heterogeneous, marginalized subjects and posi- tionalities in relation to a valorized standard of reproductive sexuality between biologically born male-female couples who belong to the dominant racial-ethnic group and the middle class. Marginalized subjects include, but are not restricted to, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people,” (Luibhéid 170-171).

This is a good starting point in establishing the concept of “heteronormativity” in American culture, as it is important to the notion of what is “queer,” or non-normative. I’d like to first analyze a song by folk singer, Ani DiFranco.

This song, called “In or Out,” mostly works to stress the ridiculousity of the binaries in the gender system with lyrics like:

“Guess there’s something wrong with me
Guess I don’t fit in
No one wants to touch it
No one knows where to begin
I’ve got more than one membership
To more than one club
And I owe my life
To the people that I love”

But I also saw an element of the queer body and mobility in this song, which may be a stretch, but I read the following lines to be a confrontation of gender identity in a situation where mobility is occurring, whether this man who is looking her “up and down,” is someone checking her ID at an airport, or even someone working at a bank. To me, the relationship between DiFranco’s identity and mobility in these lyrics is strong, whether it’s literal mobility or a more metaphorical one:

“He looks me up and down
Like he knows what time it is
Like he’s got my number
Like he thinks it’s his
He says,
Call me, Miss DiFranco,
If there’s anything I can do
I say,
It’s Mr. DiFranco to you”

Another song I found to represent a more kind of class mobility in relation to both race and queerness is Tracy Chapman’s (singer of one-hit wonder “Fast Car”) song “Subcity.”

While it’s not incredibly important information, Tracy Chapman is a lesbian, or is at least bisexual–so, this, to me really makes the song about more than just a class war, but also about a war against queer mobility. Chapman sings:

“That there is a city underground
Where people live everyday
Off the waste and decay
Off the discards of their fellow man

Here in subcity life is hard
We can’t receive any government relief
Won’t you please, please give Mr. President my honest regards
For disregarding me

They say there’s too much crime in these city streets
My sentiments exactly
Government and big business hold the purse strings
When I work, I work in the factories
I’m at the mercy of the world
I guess I’m lucky to be alive”

The song “Subcity” really paints a portrait of a dilapidated city that the government has failed to take care of (which harkens to our discussion about the state not wanting to be anyone’s parent). I think this song makes a powerful statement, especially with lines like “Won’t you please, please give Mr. President my honest regards / For disregarding me.”

Privates, Publics, and Other Ideas

According to an article by Patricia Leigh Brown, published in the New York Times, “Bathrooms have become a cultural ‘fault line,’ said Mary Anne Case, a law professor at the University of Chicago, where the Queer Action Campaign for Gender-Neutral Bathrooms recently got 10 single-use restrooms on campus designated gender neutral,” (Brown). The quoted professor also said, ”Very few spaces in our society remain divided by sex,” Professor Case said. ‘There’s marriage and there’s toilets, and very little else,’” (Brown). But the reality for many transpeople is that bathrooms can be scary, especially if they do not “pass” as the other gender. The same article quoted above interview a student on his views of gender neutral bathrooms, ”‘I use the male bathroom, because I live my life as a male,’ said Rolan Gregg, a 29-year-old student at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco, who was born female and, though he is taking hormones, does not ‘pass yet,’ as he put it. ‘The problem with not passing is that my risk of violence is really high. So going to the bathroom becomes really scary,’” (Brown). This frightening reality is made…humorous(!) by a transmasculine artist named Adhamh Roland, with his song “Bathrooms, Boxes, Binary.”

In the song, Roland sings witty lyrics like:

“Well I really have to urinate

And I don’t want to have to wait

But no matter which bathroom I’m choosing

Folks do swear I’ve made some mistake”

However, this poses a real issues for transpeople, and as student Rolan Gregg quoted above said, is a real site of violence. I don’t think that in his song Roland takes this for granted at all, but by glossing over the violent aspect of the situation, he creates an understanding that the binary system in place is silly, especially when he talks about the stick figure wearing the triangle (my favorite part).

Roland also amusingly puts a situation about filling in the M or F boxes:

“You got two boxes and you’ve got to check one

Check M or F

Boxes leave no room for fun

But I’m not sure what they’re asking

So I draw my own octagon”

While this is probably the least well known artist I have in this post, I feel like it is very important to include an artist like Adhamh, and to maybe question why he is not more popular. Is it because he doesn’t fit with any of the norms we observe and replicate socially? Probably, but I’m glad I found him and can share his work with you.

Visual Citizenship and State Surveillance

For this section, I want to start by scaring you in a seemingly random way. The following is a quote from Marge Van Cleef, written in a journal called Peace and Freedom:

“The use of unmanned drone aircraft is futuristic, high-tech warfare made real. Creech Air Force Base in Nevada is the headquarters for coordinating these aerial systems of surveillance and the increasingly lethal attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) take off from runways in the country of origin, controlled by a pilot, nearby, ‘on the ground.’ But once many of the UAVs are airborne, teams inside trailers at Creech Air Force base begin to control them. When the pilots ‘fly’ drones over actual land in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they can see faces; they can gain a sense for the terrain and study the infrastructure. A drone’s camera can show them pictures of everyday Ufe in a region, or even inside someone’s home.”

Okay, so why include this? Because it confirms fears of state surveillance and discusses the very real technology America possesses that we can use to surveil. That being said, I want to bring this back to a discussion about music, but in this section, it’s songs that have everything to do with the fear of surveillance, warranted or not. First is a song by Rockwell, that I’m sure most of you have heard in a Geico commercials:

Notable lyrics are:

“I don’t know anymore
Are the neighbors watching me
Well is the mailman watching me
And I don’t feel safe anymore, oh what a mess
I wonder who’s watching me now–the IRS?

I always feel like somebody’s watching me
And I have no privacy”

While this song seems to delve more into personal paranoia vs. state-centered paranoia, it does have elements of fear concerning the state (the IRS, for example). So I’d like to ask, what are the implications of having a popular song like this (sidebar: Michael Jackson even sings on this track) being in the social consciousness? Do people relate to this feeling, or it just a fun track?

Sadly, the next song I want to discuss is not available for free on YouTube, so I will just post a link to Amazon if someone would like to actually purchase it. It is by MC Lars and K.Flay, also titled “Somebody’s Watching Me,” but it goes deeper into a fear of the state and of surveillance than Rockwell’s song does:

“In the walls, in the floors, in the halls, in the doors

In the sky, in the car, late at night, from afar

Why you gotta be in my space?

‘Just doing my job, keeping you safe’

On the phone line, email, we know every detail

ATM pin codes, all up in my Gmail

It’s like hide and seek

Can’t a girl get a little privacy?”

The chorus of the song, quoted above, raises concern over having every aspect of one’s life being surveilled by the government, including email and ATM pin codes. One line I really liked was, “Panopticon they say it makes us safer from the Taliban / But what we gonna when all the laws are gone?” not just because it uses the word “panopticon” but also because it harkens to the fear of bodies of color and a linking them to terrorism.

Some more great lines:

“No privacy they got us locked down

Satellites in the air, spy cams on the ground

Every village, every city, every town

Tracking all our moves like a bloodhound”

I really like how this song takes fears and anxieties about surveillance and really hits home, it is not just talking about fear, but also possibly instilling it.

Forced Immobilities and the Prison-Industrial-Military Complex

For this section, I want to begin by talking about the FIERCE chart we discussed in class, which shows the pattern between trans youth and the prison system. On this chart, is shows that trans youth often either drop out due to harassment, or do not finish high school so it’s harder to get a job, or are often kicked out of their homes or leave due to restraint or abuse. Both of these often lead to unemployment and/or homelessness and in some cases, arrest for “quality of life” crimes like sleeping outside, etc.

The song “Prison Song” by System of a Down, attempts to educate listeners of popular music about the prison system, with facts interspersed throughout.

“Following the rights movements
You clamped on with your iron fists
Drugs became conveniently
Available for all the kids

Nearly two million Americans are incarcerated in the prison system

Prison system of the U.S.

Minor drug offenders fill your prisons
You don’t even flinch
All our taxes paying for your wars
Against the new non rich

The percentage of Americans in the prison system
Prison system has doubled since 1985″

While this song has a lot to do with minor drug offenses and less to do with the trans body in the prison system, I think there’s a large relationship between the increase of people in US prisons and the trans body. With people leaving home and/or school and being out the streets, options that are often prevalent are selling drugs or prostitution, both of which are arrestable offenses. The lines in this song, however, that I feel are most powerful are “They’re tryin’ to build a prison / For you and me.” This is incorporated with the paranoid felt towards the state and also the expanding amount of people that are being sent to prison.

Finally, a song by Erykah Badu, called “Soldier.”

I think the lyrics, especially the opening lyrics have a lot to say about the prison-industrial complex, even if they’re not explicitly linked in the song.

“See he’s organized
And he’s on the ball
Never miss a day of school
And he’s a underdog
Wanna learn more and more
Cuz his mama taught him good
He’s about to change the face
Of yo ghetto neighborhood
Walking to school today
Saw a brother on the streets
Seem like errthang was cool
Cept the brother’s packing heat”

The poignant scene of a bright young man being shot is very heartbreaking. And I think that this “ghetto neighborhood” is just another example of the effects of the prison-industrial complex. Was the brother a cop? The song points toward that, especially when Badu says:

“You need to watch da dirty cop
Dey the one you need to watch
Im talking bout the dirty cop
Dey the one you need to watch
Stop”

Music is a huge force in all of our lives and presumably ever shall be. Looking at its effects on us can change how we feel about what we listen to, and maybe lead us to actually LISTEN TO what is being said. I’ll leave you with a quote from Angela Davis, “Music today is commodified, subject to global economy. Companies rather than musicians decide content…. We have to engage in political struggle in the realm of culture. That is what most young people are interested in today. Young people are drawn to culture today in the same way they were draw to marches in the 1960′s. We need intergenerational connections to move in a direction that will bring about radical change,” (Blues).

Works Cited

“ANI DIFRANCO – IN OR OUT LYRICS.” Lyrics. Web. 15 June 2011. <http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/In-Or-Out-lyrics-Ani-DiFranco/653F5779502099F948256AE10029EA21>.

“Blues, Hip Hop and U.S. Prisons: Angela Sees Potential for Class and Generational Unity.” Michigan Citizen XX.20: B1. ProQuest. Web. <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=493080841&sid=2&Fmt=3&clientId=17454&RQT=309&VName=PQD>.

Brown, Patricia Leigh. “A Quest for a Restroom That’s Neither Men’s Room Nor Women’s Room.” New York Times. ProQuest. Web. <A Quest for a Restroom That’s Neither Men’s Room Nor Women’s Room>.

“ERYKAH BADU – SOLDIER LYRICS.” Lyrics. Web. 15 June 2011. <http://www.metrolyrics.com/soldier-lyrics-erykah-badu.html>.

FIERCE. Transgender Youth and the Prison-Industrial Complex. Digital image. Web. <http://www.fiercenyc.org/media/docs/5166_transyouthPICflowchart.pdf>.

Luibhéid, Eithne. “Queer/Migration an Unruly Body of Scholarship.” Print.

“Rockwell – Somebody’s Watching Me Lyrics.” Lyrics, Song Lyrics – LyricsMode.com. Web. 15 June 2011. <http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/r/rockwell/somebodys_watching_me.html>.

“SOMEBODY’S WATCHING ME LYRICS – MC LARS.” Lyrics. Web. 15 June 2011. <http://www.songlyrics.com/mc-lars/somebody-s-watching-me-lyrics/>.

“SYSTEM OF A DOWN – PRISON SONG LYRICS.” Lyrics. Web. 15 June 2011. <http://www.metrolyrics.com/prison-song-lyrics-system-of-a-down.html>.

“TRACY CHAPMAN – SUBCITY LYRICS.” Music Lyrics. Web. 15 June 2011. <http://www.elyricsworld.com/subcity_lyrics_tracy_chapman.html>.

Van Cleef, Marge. “Drone Warfare = Terrorism.” Peace and Freedom70.1 (2010): 20. ProQuest. Web. <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=2038394261&sid=3&Fmt=3&clientId=17454&RQT=309&VName=PQD>.

Eithne Luibheid argues in her book, Entry Denied, that although “asylum, like refugee status is supposedly available to people fleeing persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion… it has been interpreted in ways that privilege some applicants while marginalizing others” (Luibheid 105).  For instance, while many women were applying for asylum the 1980’s due to rape, the interpretation of the five previously listed criteria refused to recognize “women” as a social group, and thus if the rape was not committed due to the other four criteria, it was considered a “strictly personal” issue which receives no recognition under asylum law (107).  It is obvious under this interpretation that human rights discourse, considered to be part of a “’global’ ethic… left out the rural subaltern and recuperated a colonial relationship with the colonizing West, thus reviving the notion of the ‘White man’s burden’” (Grewal 123).  So, although the U.S. adopted the words of an international adherence to human rights, these rights were limited depending on the opinion of a dominant patriarchal system, one that does not wish to be “burdened” with the plight of certain immigrants seeking asylum.

Thankfully, due to advocates’ efforts and the INS’s willingness to accept their recommendations, rape has changed from a personal issue to a human rights violation in most cases of asylum requests.  However, the requirement of testimony from those seeking asylum still mandates a certain story.  This is problematic because  “the legal procedures that are used to elicit such testimonies ‘construct asylum seekers from the Third World either as unworthy claimants or as supplicants begging to be saved from the tyranny of their own cultures, communities, and men’” (Razack, quoted in Luibheid 113).  If this discursive method is not used, the asylum seeker will likely be unsuccessful in their request (114).

In terms of fluctuating refugee/asylum policies, Eithne Luibheid provides a great example of prioritizing politics over individual human rights.  She analyzes the likelihood of granting refugee status to Cubans versus Haitians in the 1980’s, which “had less to do with individual motivations than with the country they left behind, … the community that received them, … and their color…” (115).  This example clearly illustrates how women seeking asylum from the Taliban would likely experience less stringent policies in terms of the ease of applying for asylum and how their application is read, because accepting these bodies marks the U.S. as morally superior to the “violent men” from which these women are fleeing, further disseminating post 9/11 nationalist discourse. On the contrary, men perceived as Middle Eastern or Muslim may be denied asylum status for fear of their connection in terrorist plots.

Further hindrances to immigration due to threats of terrorist and other infiltration can be observed in the ideation of the U.S.-Mexico border.  These hindrances are achieved through the social construction of the national security risks, “representations of the border as ‘out of control,’ and images of the border as the site through which Latino ‘aliens’… enter and threaten the United States (Rodriguez, quoted in Luibheid 118), and have resulted in

Found at http://www.grouchyoldcripple.com/archives/000337.html

mass hiring to patrol this border (120).  It is important to note here that the rhetoric used to gain support for patrolling the Mexican border is absent from discussions of the Canadian border, which is patrolled much less rigorously.  So, the United States creates the story to explain which borders matter and which do not, thus paving the way for the acceptance of extreme measures and the denial of border patrol personnel issues.

I would like to turn now to the justifications for granting Middle Eastern women asylum while condemning Middle Eastern men who are assumed to be violent terrorists.  While not all feminism subscribes to this ideology, Global Feminism promotes the concept of a unified, worldwide, “woman” who is severely oppressed in some parts of the world and freer in others.  Inherent in this association is the concept of the more progressive “subjects who (see) themselves as more ethical and free, and thus as feminist subjects able to work against and within the state for the welfare of women around the world” (Grewal 125).  The idea that the independent women of developed countries must be the saviors of women from developing areas that are “abject, backward and oppressive” points to further justification for granting these women asylum (Bacchetta 303).  This presentation also bolsters the view that an immigrant is “someone who desires America” (original emphasis), which leads to the “shaping (of) popular cultural representations” and “legislation and policymaking in the United States” (Somerville 659).

Two specific popular culture representations, Khlaed Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, illustrate the concept of a misogynist Muslim culture from the view of an “immigrant” of Afghanistan.  Although Hosseini was born in Afghanistan, his family moved to France when he was young, and then migrated to the U.S. when the Soviets invaded and occupied their hometown of Kabul.  Therefore, Hosseini’s name, place of birth, and visual appearance suggests that he is an immigrant from Afghanistan, while his opinions have been formed through exposure to American representations of the Middle East and the terrorist for quite some time.  Coeli Fitzpatrick says that the books’ “confirmations of such simplistic ahistoric narratives reinforce the mainstream media representations of the whole Middle East and Islamic world as so morally deficient that the only possible Western response is the violent destruction and recreation of the Orient” (Fitzpatrick 244).

An example of this moral deficiency

Found at http://blondierocket.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/the-kite-runner/

is the general degradation of characters living in Afghanistan in The Kite Runner.  The main character, a privileged “Pushtun” boy, seems troubled by his friendship with the live in servant boy, who is a “Hazara,” or lower class citizen.  At the beginning of the story, a local boy rapes the servant and our “hero” does nothing to stop it.  Later, the hero and his father flee Kabul for America during Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.  When the hero returns to Afghanistan to find his former friend’s son who has been orphaned due to the conflict there, he finds the boy in the custody of a Taliban member, non other than the childhood foe who had committed forcible sodomy on the hero’s friend at the beginning of the book (Hosseini).  It is obvious from his seductive caressing of the child’s stomach and his dominant hold on the boy that he has also been molesting him.  This representation of the Taliban terrorist embodies the “hypervisible icons” that construct the terrorist as a sexually perverse being, one that has “failed heterosexuality, Western notions of the psyche,” (Puar 117) and is a queer monstrosity, all at once situating Western morality as superior and linking homosexuals and terrorists in a single, deviant group that upholds heteronormativity and further denounces a backward Muslim culture.  This conceptualization informs U.S. immigration policy by increasing the visibility and legitimacy of persecuted women (and children) fleeing Middle Eastern patriarchal oppression.

Hosseini’s second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns creates a bond between two women, Miriam and Laila who are married to Rasheed, a violent, domineering patriarchal figure.  Throughout the story, Rasheed is emotionally and physically abusive towards both women, sometimes for no reason other than their being accessible to him for such abuse, but especially when they attempt to disobey him.  Rasheed’s cruelty is coupled with stupidity, making him an especially loathsome figure.  By the end of the book, Miriam kills Rasheed in self defense and she then sacrifices her own life to by turning herself into the Taliban who execute her while Laila escapes (Hosseini).  In this way the book focuses on the self-degradation that Afghanis has suffered through trying to govern themselves.  Fitzpatrick says in her analysis that “by the end of his book, Hosseini has used almost every common stereotype of the Muslim man: infinitely sexual, irrational, and cruel,” and that the book “seems designed to portray misogyny simply as an innate characteristic of most Afghan men” (Fitzpatrick 249).  The addition of both of these books to many college reading lists shows how pervasive and relevant these themes are to the U.S. even in terms of supposed education.  It also implies that Oriental resistance to American intervention in forces the “well-intentioned West to use violence to bring about the moral rehabilitation of the recalcitrant other” (Fitzpatrick 245) and save the helpless Oriental women victims in the process.  This also

Found at http://susmarini.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/a-thousand-splendid-suns-by-khaled-hosseini-2/

aids in the war effort by creating a discourse of necessary invasion and occupation, because by doing so the U.S. is “freeing people,” which explains “American preoccupation with violent regime change” (247).  Without the allowance and aid of asylum on the basis of persecution by this (U.S. labeled) violent culture, the rhetoric of the necessity of war would be less credible, and place the U.S. in a position to explain its complicity in displacing women without accepting them into its own borders.  These textual examples of media that contribute and uphold the rhetoric of necessary occupation work to further garner sympathy for women and “normal” Muslim men who are being persecuted by an innately hostile, homosexual, monster terrorist.

The conceptualization of dangerous terrorism in the Orient also gives way to heternormative discourse following an “us” versus “them” mentality.  Reading into “hegemonic masculinity” which pervades the U.S. and the West in general, it becomes visible how “the nation-state sharpens the defining lines of citizenship for women, racialized ethnicities, and sexualities in the construction of a socially stratified society” (Kaplan 1).  Thus, even though Oriental women may experience fewer hardships in gaining asylum in the U.S., they are still on the bottom stratum of society, a stratum occupied by those who America is morally just enough to allow entering the country, even though they are a burden.  This is true even of some Global Feminists who perpetuate “’imagined communities of women’ with ‘divergent histories and social locations, woven together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only pervasive but also systematic’” (Mohanty, quoted in Kaplan 13).  In this way, Global Feminists may conceive of a sisterhood between all women, a sisterhood that exists solely because of their sex despite the many inconsistencies that inform the lives women.

Further, arguing that states, as patriarchal structures, are unable to attend to issues regarding women, many women’s groups feel that they are “better able to address problems such as violence against women” (Grewal 127).  However, these groups fail to address the egregious and numerous sites where violence in Western countries has denied human rights to certain bodies at certain times.  For instance, the use of physical force and state sanctioned sexual assault are common occurrences in prisons around the country.  However, in the wake of 9/11, hysteria and patriarchy allowed these forms of violence to become common practice in airports due to the Real ID Act in 2005 (Beauchamp 360).   This act allows airport personnel to detain anyone who appears to be (or is) cross-dressing on the grounds that “male bombers may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny” (Department of Homeland Security, quoted in Beauchamp 356).  In his article, “Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and U.S. State Surveillance After 9/11”, Toby Beauchamp argues that:

“ These examples demonstrate that perceived gender normativity is not limited strictly to gender, but is always infused with regulatory norms of race, class, sexuality and           nationality. Thus individuals need not be transgender-identified to be classified as gender-nonconforming. Bodies may be perceived as abnormal or deviant because of gender presentations read through systems of racism, classism, heterosexism, and particularly in the case of the Advisory’s focus on Al-Qaeda, Islamophobia” (360).

Beauchamp nicely illustrates how U.S. terror rhetoric has been used as a way to justify state violence against gender deviant bodies.  Yet, at the same time, women from the U.S. (who is committing its own violence) assume the necessity of such acts and look abroad for someone to save, much to the chagrin of some women from these “more oppressive” states.

One such woman, writing in, The Color of Violence: The INCITE Anthology, says of the attempts to liberate her from a dictator, “I do not need to be rescued by anyone… my yearning for freedom is my own instinct… leave me alone.”  While Western women often view solidarity with oppressed women of the Orient as altruistic and justified, this woman says, “The only solidarity I am interested in seeing is the kind that throws a wrench in the war machine which occupies my homeland” (The Color of Violence).  This view is understandable when cultural relativism is removed from liberation discourse.  To women who enjoy where they live, love their husbands and children, and respect the norms of their culture, American “creation of the third world victim as an object of rescue by first world NGOs” delegitimizes nonwestern states and legitimizes western activism (Grewal 133).  This creation also legitimizes achieving this activism through military action, further suggesting that violence against the Orient, terrorist other is necessary to save its victims and welcome them into the safety net of the American nation.  Unfortunately, even the concept of good intentions cannot redeem the invasion of Afghanistan, as many women’s groups attest to the fact that women’s demands are still only met with “lip service” from new administration and that “in rural areas, Taliban-era conditions prevail for women” (133).

The assumption of knowledge about a large group of people simply because of their place of origin proves problematic in other ways also.  To exacerbate the many ironies of savior discourse and moral superiority, one need look no further than the torture committed at Abu Ghraib.  Many of the pictures displayed naked male POWs in close proximity to one another and often times touching.  To understand why this specific use of torture was used, America looked to “experts” of Muslim culture.  One such expert Bernard Haykel, quoted by Jasbir Puar in her chapter, “intimate control, infinite detention” explained that  “Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men” (Puar 138).  This explanation worked wonders on the consciences’ of American citizens.  The condemnation of homosexuality, assumed to be an “acceptable” lifestyle in America, was dangled as an easy answer to what led these men to even be susceptible to such a situation.  If they had only been more progressive and accepting, this torture method would not have been used against them.  However, this claim masks not only the fact that the majority of men in the U.S. would also find this to be torturous and humiliating, but also ignored that fact that “sodomy (collapsed as homosexual sex) less than a year earlier had been illegal in several states in American law“ (138).  In this utterance based on beliefs about the Islamic religion, Haykel erased the legibility of homosexuality as anything more than a torture tactic, and erased the torture itself, laying blaming instead on the “absoluteness of Muslim sexual repression” (139).

So, in the contemporary discussion of Global Feminism, even conservative Presidents such as George W. Bush can find the systematic oppression of women as intolerable, especially if the adoption of such discourses renders imperialist violence against the dark skinned Other as justified and necessary.  The acknowledgement of special circumstances, which give Muslim women a greater chance of receiving asylum status in the U.S., is temporized by the further intentions in Oriental countries, which are labeled as safe havens for terrorists.  In this way, Global Feminism itself is being used by the Patriarchal state to further its own agenda.  As Inderpal Grewal asserts, “’International’ alliances forged under the auspices of the UN enabled the deployment of imperial discourses by powerful states.  The United States used human rights as a tool of geopolitics to assert its supremacy and its imperial projects” (Grewal 149).  The sites through which it aimed to achieve its goals include asylum law through the augmentation and decrease of policies concerning Muslim women; popular cultural media intended to paint a specific picture of the Orient and its treatment of women, such as Khaled Hosseini’s books; and the construction of an all encompassing picture of the Orient and Orientals which marked all Middle Eastern bodies as either in need of being freed, or corrupt and inherently evil.  These patriarchal discourses have led to the current War on Terror, the subjugation of dark skinned and/or perceptually deviant bodies, and the wide spread desire to liberate and save the oppressed women of the Orient.  However, before the U.S. begins to save other countries from patriarchal domination, it should start by eliminating its influence at home first.          

Works Cited

Bacchetta, Paola, Tina Campt, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallem, and                    Jennifer Terry. “Transnational Feminist Practices Against War: A Statement                        Written in the Aftermath of 9-11.” Meredians 2.2 (2002): 302-8.

Beauchamp, Toby. “Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and             U.S. State Surveillance after 9/11.” Surveillance and Society 6.4 (2009): 356-66.

Fitzpatrick, Coeli. “New Orientalism in popular fiction and memoir: an illustration of                 type.” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4.3 (2009): 243-256. Communication &             Mass Media Complete. EBSCO. Web. 13 June 2011.

Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms.                         Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead Trade, 2007.

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Trade, 2003.

Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem. Between Woman and Nation:             Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Durham, NC: Duke UP,                 1999.

Luibheid, Eithne.  Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis:                     University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Puar, Jasbir. “Infinite Control, Indefinite Detention: Rereading the Lawrence Case.”                     Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke                          University Press, 2007. 114-65.

Puar, Jasbir Kaur and Amit S. Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and              the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20.3 (2002): 117-48.

Somerville, Siobhan. “Notes toward a Queer History of Naturalization.” American                        Quarterly 57.3 (2005): 659-75.

The Color of Violence: The INCITE Anthology. Ed. INCITE!: Women of Color Against             Violence. Cambridge: South End Press, 2006.

This paper argues for a queer revisioning of border studies, as an extension of feminist scholarship, as it relates to migrant narratives and institutional systems of physical and metaphysical violence. I examine queer Chicana/Latina constructions of identity in performance and narrative relying specifically on the work of Monica Palacios (Latin Lezbo Comic, Greetings From A Queer Señorita,  Sweet Peace, Clock, Miercoles Loves Luna) and Cherrie Moraga (Coatlicue’s Call, The Hungry Woman: Mexican Medea, Heroes and Saints, Shadow of a Man, Giving up the Ghost). Narratives of female bodies in migration have already been explored in relation to the border; albeit such scholarship is still new to the larger field of study. How does the examination of the queer Chicana/Latina body complicate this pre-existing narrative? What does this emergent queer identity in performance suggest in terms of current immigration politics?

I employ recent queer migrant scholarship to explore these questions on queer constructions and mobility within sites of the borderlands studies—specifically the U.S.-México border. Queer Theory scholars Siobhan Somerville and Eithne Luibhéd suggest the confluence of U.S. citizenship, mobility, and sexuality as they work to perpetuate representations of queerness. Somerville states, “Although studies of nationalism and sexuality have had a central place within queer studies for more than a decade, the field has only recently begun to focus specifically on the role of immigration and naturalization in setting the terms for discourses of sexual citizenship and national belonging in the United States” (659). In deconstructing immigrant desire and affect for the nation, Somerville reveals prevalent heteronormative migrant narratives imposed by governing state immigration policy and law.

Luibhéd acknowledges the dominant ideology “that migrants are heterosexuals (or on their way to becoming so) and queers are citizens (even though second-class ones)” (170). In this model, movement is positioned with migrants and aligns with a heterosexual construction of the immigrant, as Somerville, likewise, demonstrates in her analysis of the subjugation of queers through immigration policy. Equally, queers are situated as stationary ‘citizens’ within this structure—although Luibhéd is careful to denote their diminished social status. With queers confined to stasis, an argument can made for their lack of mobility within the governing social and power structures and, as an extension, performance. Heterosexuals, however, are privileged with a freedom of mobility despite any overlaying subjugation by race—in other words, within the governing national heteronormative structure, sexuality supersedes race with movement of power.

Queer migrants do not fit within this framework because such mobility would challenge the existing designation of power. However, to complicate this model of mobility is the proliferation of the “affluent gay” identity. Forces of economy work to shape this homonormative identity of the queer, mainly male, construct of wealth and mobility. As defined by Lisa Duggan, “homonormativity” refers to “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency, and a gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan qtd. in Agathangelou 124-126). An example of this can be witnessed in tourism marketing specifically to gay couples or individuals. This serves to highlight the structuring economic system as it produces queer identities while simultaneously denying them in the case of those queers who remain outside this class structure. Somerville and Luibhéd re-negotiate power, in their studies, by exposing state practices of producing heteronormative citizens thus allocating mobility to those remaining marginalized queer migrants.

Overlaying these concerns is a consideration of the changing minority identity over time and the treatment of the queer body through its historical context. This paper examines early works of playwrights Monica Palacios and Cherrie Moraga as they relate to more contemporary narratives of queer bodies.

Cherríe Moraga, distinguished playwright, poet, and essayist, has been read, critiqued, and analyzed over the span of her almost thirty years of collective work. Her plays and publications have received national recognition, including a TCG Theatre Artist Residency Grant in 1996, the NEA’s Theatre Playwrights’ Fellowship in 1993, and two Fund for New American Plays Awards.  In 2007, she was awarded the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature; in 2008, a Creative Work Fund Award, and in 2009, a Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwriting[3].

Moraga has often been cited as the first “out” Chicana lesbian published or produced in theatre. Her work overthrows the dominant heteronormativity of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. She is committed to voicing the feminist, queer, indigenous and radical politics that counter practices of colonialism. Still active in writing and producing performance pieces, Moraga’s work is reflective of the continued presence (and importance) of queer and migrant narratives. “Her efforts to textualize the dynamic, messy relationship between racial formation and sexual identity yield a rich, expansive primary terrain for scholars invested in challenging monological approaches to identity” (Soto 2005, 238). This approach to identity construction provides an opportunity for re-visioning specifically queer female migrant bodies as it relates existing narratives of migration, (homo)sexuality, and feminism.

Moraga’s current work (now auditioning), New Fire: On the Road to Consciencia Xicana, maintains vestiges of her collective works as a whole. The piece counters “Hollywood’s doomsday predictions for 2012…[and] marks the closing of the epoch by inscribing ‘a cosmic contract for a fundamental change in human consciousness. The play, which is a performance and ceremony at once, follows the sacred geography of Indigenous American mythologies to tell a 21st century story of rupture, migration and homecoming. It marks that moment in history when maligned female spirits return to the earth ‘to make things right again.’”[4] Moraga’s forthcoming piece centralizes around a narrative of movement and mobility.

Preceding this work, Moraga presented a workshop production of an original performance piece La Semilla Caminante/The Traveling Seed (2010). In 2008, Cherrie Moraga (playwright), Celia Herrera Rodriguez (InstallationVisual Artist) and Alleluia Panis (Choreographer), received a grant from the Bay Area Creative Work Fund in collaboration with San Francisco’s Campo Santo Theater[5] to support a performance work in dialogue with (im)migrant/indigenous communities in Arizona, California, and Oregon.  The work revolves around a theme of women separated from their children and lands of origin through forced migration and violence. Here again, concerns surrounding migration, and by extension immigration policy, and violence are visible and reflect growing scholarship on the queer migrant body.

With the exception of her latest works, Moraga’s canon has been examined by scholars interested in the stylistic conventions, narrative tropes, and political advocacy that her pieces proclaim. Most recently, scholar Sandra K. Soto has taken a different approach to the material by presenting a “queer reading” of Moraga’s work. “Cherríe Moraga’s uncanny aptitude for resignifying language, bodies, epistemologies, politics, and the most obstinate identity categories—which she often puts to use in her other unfeasible project of self-racialization—is so undoubtedly queer that her work might seem an unlikely candidate for an actively queer reading” (Soto 2005, 237-8). Soto challenges predominant notions that queering only normative texts is “an enormously useful project, because it conscientiously illuminates the iterations, tautologies, and narrative devices that occlude the constructedness of—as well as the labor entailed in reproduction—normativity” (238).  By presenting a queer reading of Moraga’s work, Soto demonstrates the ways in which queer theory is as pervasive today as it was in its height and presents “a critique that queer theory is not capable of offering an incisive analysis in the current historical moment” (258).

Like Moraga, Monica Palacios is critically acclaimed as a queer Chicana writer and performer and is widely recognized as working at the forefront of Chicana/Latina, queer, and feminist performance.  Her lengthy career as an artist has strongly embraced activism, community organizing, and cultural work.  Monica is cited as the first “out” Chicana lesbian comic to hit the stage during the early eighties. Her performance style, modeled on stand-up comedy, employs unique—often physical—conventions in her work. Many of her pieces have been written as one-woman shows and plays. Her plays, short stories, poems and essays, have been published in numerous pivotal anthologies including: Out of The Fringe (1999), Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991), and Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology (1999).

Palacios’ performance, The OH! Show, was recently published in the MALCS journal volume of Chicana/Latina Studies, Spring 2009.  She has been featured as the subject of critical discussion by leading scholars in the fields of Chicano/Latino Studies and LGBT/Queer Studies. Her performances and publications continue to be studied in universities nationally and internationally.

In 2008, Palacios was selected by Adelante Magazine as a Latino LGBT Community Leader for its 10th Year Anniversary.  In 2009, Palacios was the first openly gay performer at the Los Angeles Catholic institution of Loyola Marymount University. Also that year, she was awarded a National Performance Network Residency to participate in the International Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz Festival in Houston.  Palacios has been honored by numerous national organizations and publications, recognized for her many contributions to the queer Latino/Latina population and the LGBT communities.

Lubhéid, in “Looking Like a Lesbian,” presents an account of Sara Harb Quiroz’s detention while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 1960. This event presents an early case of denied entry due to lesbian profiling. Lubhéid states of event, “The case of Quiroz provides us with a window onto immigration service efforts to identify and exclude foreign-born women who were believed to be lesbians” (77). The policing of female bodies at the border, according to Lubhéid, is fairly new to scholarly analysis. She surmises that this is largely due to a lack of documentation of such instances. It is difficult to surmise that there simply were not cases of lesbian profiling and thus no documentation exists, therefore, what factors account for the lack of information on such encounters? To question why there is a lack of documentation surrounding lesbian border policing speaks to the ways in which queer females have remained outside a historical narrative situated on male homosexuality. Similarly, the case highlights the ways in which sexual monitoring of the border is gender differentiated

Quiroz’s case, which Lubhéid acknowledges to be the only documented case involving a woman uncovered to-date, provides an opportunity to “renarrate the history of lesbian and gay immigration exclusion in a way that centers, rather than subsumes, specifically female experiences,” furthermore, Lubhéid states that Quiroz’s case, “raises questions about the complexities of mapping histories of immigrant, refugee, and transnational women while using sexual categories that substantially derive their meanings from metropolitan centers” (78). What is clear in Lubhéid’s analysis is that the focus is not on a determination of whether Quiroz was indeed a lesbian, but, more importantly, her argument centers on problematizing how mainstream institutions such as the INS, remain invested in constructing fixed boundaries of homosexual identities and visibility.

In another, more recent case, involving a transsexual woman from Mexico, state violence becomes visible as both a structuring force and site of physical abuse. Alisa Solomon analyzes this 2002 case of Christina Madrazo who was raped and assaulted while being held in an immigration detention facility by a guard. In examining this case, Solomon raises a series of questions related to the system of detention in place by state institutions: “Why are  asylum seekers—people fleeing persecution in their homelands for freedom in the United States—locked up in detention centers? Why is rape so easy to commit in such a place and, on the rare occasions when it is prosecuted, so easily reduced to misdemeanor charges? Why are the arcane systems of tort claims more accessible than criminal or civil rights laws?…The answers—complex and troubling—are obviously connected to Madrazo’s status as a transsexual transmigrant from Mexico” (4). To begin to address Solomon’s questions as they relate to structuring institutions and the queer migrant body, it is necessary to draw a connection to the prison-industrial complex[6] as a frame for understanding external forces as they produce constructions of queer identity.

Compounded in this system of interaction is trafficking, under the guise of safety and protection, of bodies—primarily queer, migrant, and racially and sexually diverse—to supply institutions of detainment. Such bodies are used for prison labor and in the promotion of prison building as a job creator. Activist group F.I.E.R.C.E., dissects this model in an advocacy poster[7] to demonstrate the force of movement the system controls. The chart traces the path of dissention of transgender bodies that leave home or school because of their sexual orientation. Under this model, this leads to unemployment and/or a state of homelessness, which results in “arrest for ‘quality of life’ crimes like sleeping outside” or “arrest for committing survival crimes like sex work.” The outcome is imprisonment of these bodies within a system of detention that both denies and ostracizes them to the point of harassment and torture.  In this way, sexuality, race, and gender play a large role in the construction and oppression of this system.

Solomon’s account provides an example of how this model works within a framework of queer immigrant bodies. In tracing Christina Madrazo’s struggle, Solomon analyzes the material and ideological analysis of immigrant detention system along with the structure of legal, juridical, civic spheres that deny Madrazo’s claim and personhood. Madrazo’s narrative follows the lines that F.I.E.R.C.E. chart. After leaving Mexico (twice) due to the violence she experience resulting from her transgendered body, Madrazo sought refuge in the United States. During her first escape, Madrazo took a route outside the immigration system and thus was unable to obtain the documentation needed to work through legal channels. Being unable to support her lively-hood, Madrazo returned to a site of violence in Mexico. During her second departure, Madrazo took the legal course of action in filing for asylum. Immigration policy in the United States dictated that Madrazo’s detention during the time her asylum case was reviewed. While detained, Madrazo was sexually assaulted by an INS officer. Her body was a target for this system of violence, as Solomon eloquently acknowledges,

Madrazo asked America to protect her from persecution as a transsexual in Mexico. Instead, a guard working for the Immigration Service—acting on behalf of the state—tried to “protect” the state by persecuting her further for being a trans/migrant woman. (24)

During the trial, which Madrazo brought forth as a consequence of the diminutive sentencing of the offending officer, Madrazo’s past misdemeanor charges were brought forth. Madrazo had been arrested twice for soliciting and defends her actions as the “routine harassment that trans women often face…[and] a measure of ‘how desperate [for income] I was’” (9). This example rests within the prison-industrial complex framework. Furthermore, these charges were used by the structuring system as evidence for the exclusion of her body in Asylum Law’s ideological system of vulnerability:

As soon as she [Madrazo] was removed from the discourse of asylum law, Madrazo shifted back into the category of ‘undocumented criminal alien.’ So her transgender status no longer cast her as a victim of a ‘primitive’ land, requiring rescue by America; quite the contrary, it became a marker of her multivalent deviance from which American itself required rescue through her deportation. (21-22)

Solomon addresses this critical point in the movement of Madrazo’s body from one sphere to another and how the structure of the system allows for this mobility while rendering Madrazo powerless—immobile. The prison-military-industrial complex negotiates a discourse of both mobility and immobility. While seemingly an immobile system by the definition of a prison system as a site of confinement, it is important to understand how mobility functions within this model. As in Madrazo’s case, the movement of ideologies in terms of bodies, identity, and construction transverse a space both in and out of sites of confinement. Media becomes a large perpetrator of this movement. Simultaneously, agency, power, and the production of bodily images are immobilized both physically and metaphysically.

The complexities of these systems make it difficult to imagine a restructuring narrative. Solomon suggests that increasing exposure of these inequalities will bring about a revision in both the structure and mentality of the system. “By bringing the charges and not letting the case drop when Smith was granted his plea bargain, Madrazo is, indeed, renarrating the dominant history and challenging people in the United States to recognize her suffering and courage” (24). Considerations of race complicate this history and narrative. As Quiroz’s case demonstrates, the visual constructs of identity are not only sexualized, but also highly racialized which Lubhéid  also recognizes: “racial and class histories integrally structure how gender and sexual identities are produced, negotiated, oppositionally deployed, and sanctioned at the border. Quiroz’s case also raises critical questions about how migrant women negotiate sexual identities and communities when the threat of state-sanctioned exclusion or deportation structures their options” (Lubhéid  2002, 101).

Moraga’s performance work operates within this space of re-visioning dominant narratives centered around race, gender, and sexuality. The acute self-reflexivity about race and sexuality that inform constructions of queer bodies in Moraga’s autobiographical works forges a space, in performance, where queer bodies become sites of dialogue for larger concerns of how identity is both performed and produced.

Moraga and Palacios share a space with other writers, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Dorothy Allison, Audre Lorde, and Maxine Hong Kingston, who are “part of an emerging group of writers who seek to represent the experience of the subject who is doubly or triply ‘marginal’ in the sense of identifying with more than one class, gender or sexual preference…[who have] narrated the experience that George Mariscal has described as ‘contradictory subjectivity’” (Simerka 1997, 89). Working from within a framework of marginalization and “contradictory subjectivity,” these authors explore the construction of identity. Examining specifically Palacio’s Latin Lezbo Comic (1991), Barbara Simerka explores the liminal subjectivity and liminal space that Palacio’s work is constructed within as it relates to these constructions of identity. Simerka suggests the formation of the “liminal subject” as a “corrective to marginalization that goes beyond the traditional Anglo-American metaphor of the melting pot” (89) which entangles the complexities of not only sexuality and gender, but also race and ethnicity.

In performance pieces, such as Moraga’s and Palacios’, “the theatrical representation of an autobiographical narrative permits the performance of identity, in which the professional performance itself constitutes an element of the ‘production’ of that self” (original emphasis, Butler qtd. in Simerka 1997, 89). This is an important consideration to address in the relationship between one’s performance ‘on stage’ and performativity ‘in life’ in an autobiography narrative.  Both Moraga and Palacios share in this tradition of identity narration through stage performance. How, then, is autobiographical text situated in relation to the embodied performance?

Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983), written in a form of verse and prose, is a personal and political autobiography. Likewise, Gloria Anzaldúa’s autobiography, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) combines the style of poetry with personal and political essays. Simerka suggests the emergence of an “alternate poetics” (90) that arises in textual autobiographical narration of marginalized groups. While, according to Simerka, “punch lines function in much the same way as the chapter divisions of longer autobiographical writings,” (91) what separates the two is the liminal space in which embodied performance allows for physical gestures and symbolic movements to convey narrative conventions. Simerka accounts for this in her analysis of Palacio’s performances:

The suggestive body movements…are indicative of the ‘extra dimension’ performance lends to the autobiographical narrative. Bodily postures function as motifs in this performance of life. In a section which examines negative stereotypes which equate the word “lesbian” with intolerably masculine activities, Palacios develops a gesture, that of a “tractor driver,” to symbolize her mockery of homophobia. She repeats this gesture throughout the performance to signify homophobic stereotypes of lesbian…Confessions: A Sexplosion of Tantalizing Tales, also utilizes body movement to enhance her performance, not through the repetition of motif poses, but through elaborate mimes. (91)

 This “extra dimension” that Simerka acknowledges is an important facet of the embodied performance as it relates to the construction of identity. As the performativity and bodily interactions of life informs identity, the embodied performance of an autobiographical narrative is primed to represent the marginalized body in a more visceral light. Moraga, in an interview about her collective work, articulates this in her response to the embodiment and orality present in her work: “Everything I write, even essays, really has an oral quality. I am a body articulating these thoughts, which implies that there is another body on the other end that hears them out loud—if only in her head. She is my auditor-witness” (Anthony 2007, 61). In this quote, Moraga also recognizes the performer-spectator relationship. This nexus of interaction provides an inlet to the connection of mobility within as singular an event as a performance.

Cherríe Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost (1989) and Monica Palacios’ Greetings from a Queer Señorita (1995) provide examples of how queer migrant identities are produced and constructed in relation to a system of border policing, mobility, and larger structural forces. The principal characters in Ghost are Marisa, Corky, and Amalia. Marisa is in her late twenties and a U.S.-born Mexican. In actuality, Marisa and Corky are the same character but embodied on stage by two different performers thus immediately setting a visual binary of what will become a play centered around “border logics”—which draws specific attention to the idea that Chicanos/as must function within and between two or more frames of reference. In this binary, Moraga offers a critical dialogue about the local and transnational histories lying within the complex grid that constitutes the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Both actors occupy the stage at the same time and at various points throughout the play, acknowledge each others’ presence. This representation of a singular subject as a “plural personality”, termed by Anzaldúa (1999).

The set is depicted as: “The suggestion of a Mexican desert landscape is illuminated upstage during scenes evoking indigenous Mexico” (Moraga 5). This design element suggests the nostalgia attached to the homeland which is starkly juxtaposed to the setting and imagery of the barrio in the United States that is also presented. Moraga opens the play with CORKY writing in graffiti-style on a wall:

Dedicación

Don’t know where this woman

and I will find each other again,

but I am grateful to her  to something

that feels like a blessing

that I am, in fact, trapped

which brings me to the question of prisons

politics

sex.

(Moraga, 6)

Moraga sets the tone of the performance through both aural and visual means. The title, “Dedicación” suggests the messages of the play are meant as a dedication to all queer Chicanas. The first lines, “Don’t know where this woman” evokes a sense of being lost and immediately establishes a female narration. By specifically using the word “trapped,” Moraga induces a parameter around the performance (in the physically limiting stage) as well as a larger metaphor of imposing force of policing institutions on migrant bodies. Likewise, specific use of the word “prison” in relation to “politics” and “sex” serve to reinforce this metaphor.

Throughout the play, Amalia’s dialogue serves to directly address the perpetuation of the what Agathangelou et al in “Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire” term as the seduction of the empire:

As we are seduced into empire’s fold by participating, often with glad and pleasure, in the deaths of those in our own communities as well as those banished to the ‘outsides’ of citizenship and subjectivity, we must ask: How are these seductions produced and naturalized? What forms of (non)spectacular violence must be authorized to heed the promises being offered by empire? (Agathangelou et al. 2008, 120).

The article suggests the “promise project” of overarching economic institutions in which “we would thus locate the mobilization of highly individualized narratives of bourgeois belonging and ascension within a larger promise project that offers to some the tenuous promise of mobility, freedom, and equality. This strategy is picked up in a privatized, corporatized, and sanitized “gay agenda” that places, for example, gay marriage and penalty-enhancing hate crimes laws at the top of its priorities” (Agathangelou et al. 123).

Amalia, thus, assumes a position of ascribing to the false narrative of the promise project of American wealth:

AMALIA:       I observe the Americans. Their security. Their houses. Their dogs. Their children are happy. They are not un…happy. Sure, they have their struggles, their problems, but…it’s a life. I always say this, it’s a life.

(Moraga, 9)

Amalia’s identity is constructed here as a body outside the dominant economic and nationalist system which is heightened by her race. Furthering this construction of identity throughout the play, Amalia is placed within a position of both movement and stasis. Her character must move—adapt—in order to identify with the American culture she wishes to “belong” to but yet she remains immobile because of her race. In this excerpt, mobility in terms of physical geographical mobility is addressed:

AMALIA:       All of us packed into the old blue Chevy. I was thirteen and la regal had started,the bleeding, and I was ashamed to tell my mother. Tía Fita had been the one to warn me that at my age, any day, I could expect to become sick. “Mala,” she said, and that when it happened I should come to her and she would bless me and tell me how to protect myself. It came the morning of our long jornada to California.

AMALIA see the “blood” coming down her leg. She takes the bandana from her head, looks around nervously, then stuffs it under her skirt, flattening it back in place.

AMALIA:       Tía Fita was not speaking to my mother so angry was she for all of us leaving. We had asked her to come with us. “What business do I have up there with all those pochos y gringos?” My father said she had no sense. It broker her heart to see us go. So, there was no running to Tía Fita that morning. It seemed too selfish to tell her my troubles when I was the one leaving her.

        (Moraga 20)

 Amalia is ashamed of “bleeding,” which represents her female body, and thus equates to her shamefulness over her own gender and sexuality. She terms the natural process as a “sickness” in need of “blessing” and “protection”. The physical movement of traveling from Mexico to the United States that is depicted here can be related to Amalia’s own construction of her negative self-identity as a female by linking migration and the queer female body.

Palacios’ Greetings adopts a different stylistic approach in the construction of a queer migrant identity. In the context of the historical time in which Greetings from a Queer Señorita (1995) was first written and produced, identity is constructed around themes of “coming out.” Throughout Palacios’ play are conflicts with self-identifying as queer and finding a familial identity within a new queer community as well as within one’s own family:

MONICA:      Every year the familia had that same holiday wish: “Por favor, let them bring home men to dinner. We don’t want to march in that gay parade!”

(Palacios 379)

Tensions within the family over queer members were paramount at this time, and, as the excerpt indicates, queer identity is aligned with gay pride and, thus, the gay pride parades that emerged during this time thus drawing a connection to the larger economic system at work in the promise project.

The play, still being produced and performed, is now situated sixteen years later in another historical frame. Examining the play from a queer migrant lens, it is evident that constructions of identity around “coming out” have shifted to account for migrant narratives of crossing-borders both physically and visually.  The play’s themes can be revisioned in contemporary production, within this applied frame, to suggest concern for the visual conventions of the corporeal body as it relates to the construction of a queer Chicana identity.

MONICA:      I should attempt the mainstream clubs because some bigwig could discover me…So I went to these clubs—and I hated it! I was so uptight. No one was to find out I was a lezbo—dyke—queer—homo—butch—muff diver!!

(Music cue: surfer song “Wipe Out” blares as Monica does the Swim. Monica does the backstroke and turns around. Music fades.)

And everybody I met was either homophobic, racist or sexist—usually, all three. But I had to give the biz a good shot because I was a fighter…sort of. I tried my darndest to act like a generic comic: straight, white, male—always on, cruising chicks, talking fast, always networking. Always. But it just wasn’t me.

(Palacios 374)

 Monica’s identity is confined to a space of heteronormativity.

Despite the decades since their first publications, both Moraga’s and Palacios’ plays acquire critical social meaning because both utilized the stage as a site of remembrance. They draw attention to the continuing erasure of Chicana cultural landscapes and presences by policy makers, popular culture, and the public at large. Moraga’s latest work is more explicit in its considerations of migrant narratives, however, her early work more subtly addresses these concerns. Both playwrights serve to re-imagine bodies through queer identities, both produced and constructed, in Chicana performance incorporating migrant narratives.

Works Cited

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Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera: the New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Print.

“Cherrie Moraga.” The Select Equity Group Series on Playwriting. Interview by Adelina Anthony. BOMB 98/Winter 2007: 60-65. BOMBSITE. Web. 10 June 2011. <http://http://bombsite.com/issues/98/articles/2879>.

Luibhéid, Eithne. “Looking Like a Lesbian: Sexual Monitoring at the U.S.-Mexico Border.” Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002. 77-101. Print.

Luibheid, Eithne. “QUEER/MIGRATION: An Unruly Body of Scholarship.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14.2-3 (2008): 169-90. Print.

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Moraga, Cherríe. Heroes and Saints & Other Plays. Albuquerque: West End, 1994. Print.

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Solomon, Alisa. “Trans/Migrant: Christina Madrazo’s All American Story.” Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Ed. Eithne Luibhe%u0301id and Lionel Cantu%u0301. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005. 3-23. Print.

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Soto, Sandra K. “CHERRIE MORAGA’S GOING BROWN: “Reading Like a Queer”" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.2 (2005): 237-63. Print.

Soto, Sandra K. Reading Chican@ like a Queer: the De-mastery of Desire. Austin: University of Texas, 2010. Print.

Svich, Caridad, and Maria Teresa. Marrero. Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000. Print.

“Theatre.” Welcome to CherrieMoraga.com. Web. 15 June 2011. <http://www.cherriemoraga.com/>.

Trujillo, Carla Mari. Living Chicana Theory. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman, 1998. Print.